Introduction

Astoria has seen a robust amount of redevelopment and new residents in the past few decades. The neighborhood’s proximity to Manhattan, waterfront, safety, relatively affordable housing, and diversity has played a big part in fueling growth and development in the area. Any potential rezoning of this important neighborhood, particularly in the context of new residential developments, will require a careful look at key metrics such as its’ housing market and demographics to ensure that future developments effectively reflect the needs of the local community.

For the purposes of this report, Astoria will refer to both Queens Community District 1 and Census Bureau Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) 4101 (which are roughly coterminous with one another).

Zoning

First, we look at a contemporary map of Astoria zoning from the NYC Planning Department:

Current Astoria Zoning Map

Current Astoria Zoning Map

Most of Astoria is currently zoned for mid-rise residential development, ranging from ‘R4’ to ‘R7’ levels (a higher R number represents zoning for taller residential developments, with a lot of areas in Manhattan zoned for R10). However, the far north of Ditmars Steinway and the south end of Astoria are primarily zoned for manufacturing use.

As can be observed by the supporting zone layers, certain areas of Astoria are already zoned for either mandatory or inclusionary affordable housing. Any future residential rezoning of Astoria would certainly involve discussion of the merits of expanding such areas, and in what locations within the neighborhood.

Construction Activity

For a better sense of how much construction activity has taken place in Astoria in recent years, we will refer to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)’s Housing New York Units by Building dataset on buildings, units, and projects that began after January 1, 2014 and are counted towards the Housing New York plan.

According to this dataset, there have been 29 building projects that have taken place in Queens Community District 1 from 2014 to 2019. Of those, 18 were classified as new construction projects, while 11 were classified as preservation projects.

## 
## New Construction     Preservation 
##               18               11

These building projects can be seen below. (Note that only 25 building projects are shown because some homeowner assistance projects do not have location information specified) . As can be seen on the map, there are clusters of construction activity in certain parts of Astoria. The waterfront near Hallets Point appears to be a popular spot for new residential developments, while the northwest of Ditmars-Steinway has had a cluster of buildings from the Marine Terrace Apartments project being constructed. There also appear to be some residential developments being built along areas of the 21st Street strip that have already been rezoned for inclusionary affordable housing.

There were 1698 total units built in total from 2014 to 2019, with 1078 of them considered ‘affordable, regulated units’ counted towards the city’s Housing New York Plan.

## [1] 1698
## [1] 1078

Of the 1078 affordable units built from 2014 to 2019, 350 of them were considered extremely low income units (i.e. affordable to households earning 0 to 30% of the area’s median income). Overall, The vast majority of these units were considered affordable to people from low to moderate income:

Over half (595 out of 1078) of the affordable units constructed were 2-bedroom units. The rest were almost all studios or 1-bedroom units.

Overall, a large share of the constructed units that counted towards the Housing New York plan appear to be affordable.

Rent

According to data from the Median Gross Rent by Bedrooms report of the American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, the average rent of a 2-bedroom in the Astoria & Long Island City neighborhood was $1,780 in 2018. This is on the higher end for neighborhoods in the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs.

Due to time constraints, all of the datasets from the Census Bureau were originally cleaned in Excel prior to importation into R.

When we compare the rent in Astoria & Long Island City to all neighborhoods in NYC, we can see that the rent of a 2-bedroom in Astoria does not appear to be too high compared to the rest of the city. However, this is a byproduct of Manhattan rents being significantly higher than the rest of the city. As the table of the neighborhoods in New York City with the most expensive 2-bedroom rentals shows, while Astoria is still in the top 10 out of 55 neighborhoods in NYC, the 2-bedroom rental price of $1,780 is still only roughly 2/3 of the most expensive neighborhood of Greenwich Village and Soho at $2,711.

## # A tibble: 10 x 9
##    puma        total studio one_bed two_bed three_bed four_bed `five_bed+`  code
##    <chr>       <dbl>  <dbl>   <dbl>   <dbl>     <dbl> <chr>    <chr>       <dbl>
##  1 NYC-Manhat~  2642   2695    2620    2711      2677 1532     -            3810
##  2 NYC-Manhat~  2088   1502    2422    2658      2248 -        -            3807
##  3 NYC-Manhat~  2299   2071    2377    2649      2419 -        -            3805
##  4 NYC-Brookl~  2119   1597    2055    2532      2345 1927     -            4005
##  5 NYC-Manhat~  2445   2158    2769    2306      2634 1767     1298         3808
##  6 NYC-Manhat~  2229   1965    2628    2192      1656 2729     -            3806
##  7 NYC-Brookl~  2116   1792    2442    2168      1339 944      672          4004
##  8 NYC-Queens~  1763   1569    1707    1906      2002 -        -            4108
##  9 NYC-Queens~  1942   1696    1490    1885      2408 2620     -            4104
## 10 NYC-Queens~  1696   1407    1681    1780      1831 2176     -            4101

Tax Expenditures

New York City uses a form of tax abatement and other foregone tax revenue in order to induce developers to create and/or preserve affordable housing units. NYC HPD has published a dataset of tax incentives that have been provided for Local Law 44 Housing Development Projects since 2013. These tax incentives are defined as the estimated dollar amount for Year 1 of associated tax exemption. By comparing the level of tax incentives in Astoria to other neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, we can observe how much the city has been investing in newly constructed housing in Astoria relative to other neighborhoods nearby:

However, a complicating factor in trying to assess the level of tax expenditure by neighborhood is that some projects that received tax incentives constructed buildings in multiple boroughs and/or neighborhoods. This was resolved by finding the projects that funded buildings in multiple neighborhoods and dividing the tax expenditure spent equally amongst all the buildings in the project. For example, if a tax expenditure was $1,000,000 for a project where 3 buildings were constructed in Astoria and 2 in Bushwick, then $600,000 of the tax expenditure was deemed to have been invested in Astoria, while $400,000 was deemed to have been invested in Bushwick.

As we can see, approximately $4,844 in tax expenditures have been spent in Astoria since 2013. This appears to be a relatively low amount in comparison to the surrounding neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens - almost 10 times more tax expenditures have been put forth in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Jamaica. While there are many possible reasons for this discrepancy, the data does suggest that relatively few tax incentives have been spent constructing affordable housing in Astoria.

Affordability and Occupancy

A key metric of housing affordability is the percentage of a renter’s monthly income that goes to rent; anything above 33% is often seen as overly impacted. The American Community Survey collects annual data on the percentage of a renter’s income that goes to paying rent, which enables us to study how financially impacted Astoria residents are compared to the rest of New York City.

In 2018, 36.4% of renters in Astoria’s neighborhood had to pay over 35% of rent, which was on the lower end in New York City. Neighborhoods in Manhattan generally could more easily afford to pay for their housing, while neighborhoods such as Flushing in Queens and Borough Park in Brooklyn (the two yellow neighborhoods on the map) had 59.3% and 60.4% of their renters respectively having over 35% of their monthly income going to rent.

As this table of the monthly rent burden of Queens neighborhoods indicates, Astoria has residents who are more able to afford their rents compared to other neighborhoods in Queens. 11.8% of Astoria residents use less than 15% of their income for rent, while 36.4% use 35% or more of their income for rent.

## # A tibble: 14 x 9
##    cd    less_than_15 `15_to_19.9` `20_to_24.9` `25_to_29.9` `30_to_34.9`
##    <chr>        <dbl>        <dbl>        <dbl>        <dbl>        <dbl>
##  1 Quee~          7            8.6         10.5          9.2          5.4
##  2 Quee~          6            9.7         10.2          9.9         10.7
##  3 Quee~          9.7         11.1         12.2          5.8         10.4
##  4 Quee~         10           16            9.7          9.1          6.6
##  5 Quee~         11.5         10.2         14.1          9.2          6.8
##  6 Quee~          7.4         13.7         13.2         10.4          9.6
##  7 Quee~         15.2          8.4         10           10           12.7
##  8 Quee~         12.3         20.6          8.6         11.3          6.1
##  9 Quee~         13           13.7         11.4         11.8          9.1
## 10 Quee~          6.1         15.3          9.6         12.6         15.8
## 11 Quee~         16.7         13.4         12.3          8.8          9.5
## 12 Quee~         15.1         10.4         10.5         16.2         10  
## 13 Quee~         11.8         14.5         16.1         11.4          9.8
## 14 Quee~         19.5         10.7         12.5         14.1          8.5
## # ... with 3 more variables: `35_or_more` <dbl>, code <dbl>, borough <chr>

Finally, we look at some occupancy statistics for renters in Astoria, which also come from the U.S. Census Bureau. First off is a map of the percentage of bedrooms occupied by only 1 person in 2018, which shows some interesting trends. Astoria is on the higher end for bedrooms occupied by one person, ranking 14th out of 55 PUMAs at 37.6%. Relatively speaking, Astoria residents are able to enjoy more private bedrooms than most of the rest of New York City.

We also look at the percentage of renters who are living as part of a family household in 2018. Astoria has the 8th lowest percentage out of 55 NYC neighborhoods of families at 43.5%. Outside of Manhattan, Astoria and Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn are the two neighborhoods in NYC with the lowest percentage of renters who are living with family. Assuming that young adults are the least likely to be living with family, this is a good indication that Astoria is a neighborhood that has a disproportionately high number of residents who are single and unmarried.

Overall the affordability and occupancy data shows that Astoria is doing well as a neighborhood, at least compared to many of its neighbors in Queens. However, while Astoria may be affordable to most of its current residents, it is out of reach for many other New Yorkers who cannot afford the high rents of the area. Any discussion with the local Community Board about the need for rezoning in the area should point out how much these maps show Astoria as thriving compared to other neighborhoods in Queens, and that these conditions show that there is significant merit to the idea of allieviating these housing inequities through rezoning policy, and/or the construction of new residential developments in Astoria.

Conclusion

Overall Astoria appears to be a fairly stable neighborhood in terms of its demographics and housing market conditions. While rent is fairly high for a non-Manhattan neighborhood, Astoria renters on average do not dedicate as much of their income to rent as other neighborhoods. In addition, the racial composition of the neighborhood has remained relatively stable on time.

Since this report has primarily focused on descriptive and exploratory analysis, the evidence should be reliable given the credibility of Census Bureau and NYC data. That being said, there were some limitations to the analysis due to time constraints - there are many important demographics beyond ethnicity to consider, for example.

The success of any potential new residential developments that may result from rezoning is contingent on where exactly these developments take place. There have already been many projects built near Hallets Point, the north of Ditmar-Steinsway, and along the affordable housing corridor on 21st Street. Rezoning areas for new residential developments near those already robust housing construction areas is a strategy that should prove effective.

Finally, there already appears to be an abundance of new housing projects in Astoria since 2014 despite the relative dearth of tax incentives provided by the city so far to those developments. This indicates that the housing market in Astoria is already robust, which is sensible given many of the attractive characteristics of the Astoria neighborhood. This being so, the City should more aggressively rezone parts of Astoria for residential development and use tax incentives to mandate inclusionary housing in the area, as this can improve housing equity by providing more low-income citizens the opportunity to live in Astoria.